At dinner, Lady Becher mentioned the strange occurrence to the General, who replied with his own account. Later they went to sleep in their bedroom. Their youngest son, who was eight years old, was sleeping in a bed in the same room. He had no knowledge of the apparition. His bed was near the door to the dressing room and bathroom. During the night, the boy woke up, and his parents heard him cry out in Hindi, “What do you want, ayah? What do you want?” He had obviously seen the form of an Indian woman. On this occasion neither the General nor his wife saw the form. In fact, none of them ever saw it again. The General wrote about this last appearance: “It confirmed our feeling that the same woman had appeared to us all three, and on inquiry from other occupants we learned that it was a frequent apparition on the first night or so of the house being occupied. A native Hill, or Cashmere woman, very fair and handsome, had been murdered some years before in a hut a few yards below the house, and immediately under the door leading into the bath and dressing room, through which, on all three occasions, the figure had entered and disappeared. . . . I could give the names of some other subsequent occupants who have told us much the same story” (Myers 1903, v. 1, p. 251).
Charles Lett, a military man, recalled the following apparition incident, noteworthy because of the multiple simultaneous percipients (Griffin 1997, pp. 218–219). On April 5, 1873, his wife’s father, Captain Towns, had died in his house. Six weeks later, Lett’s wife was in one of the bedrooms of the house and saw reflected on the polished surface of a wardrobe a very detailed and lifelike image of the head and torso of Captain Towns. Accompanying her was a young lady, Miss Berthon, who also saw the image. At first they thought someone had hung a portrait of the Captain. At that moment Mrs. Lett’s sister, Miss Towns, entered the room, and before either Mrs. Lett or Miss Berthon had a chance to say anything, Miss Towns said, “Good gracious! Do you see papa?” Several household servants were summoned individually, and one after another they expressed astonishment at the apparition. Charles Lett recalled, “Finally, Mrs. Towns was sent for, and seeing the apparition, she advanced towards it with her arm extended as if to touch it, and as she passed her hand over the panel of the wardrobe the figure gradually faded away, and never again appeared.”
Was the apparition really caused by the surviving soul of Captain Towns, who manifested his form in space? Superpsi theorists would say no. But such multiple perception cases are difficult to account for by the superpsi explanation. One would have to propose that the main percipient generated in her mind an image of Captain Towns, acquiring it from her own mind or by extrasensory perception from the mind of a living person. The main percipient would then have to experience this image in the context of the room. By a process called telepathic contagion, the same image would then be transmitted to the minds of others. But extensive experiments in telepathic image transmission, reviewed in chapter 6, show that it is not easy to transmit a complete image from one mind to another. Another possible explanation is a kind of super psychokinetic (super-pk) ability, whereby the main percipient generates an actual form in three dimensional space. But whether we are talking about superpsior super-pk, there are difficulties. In this particular case, seven individuals saw the image and it looked the same to all of them. Also, the individual percipients were standing in different places in the room, and the image was placed in proper perspective for each of them. It is also significant that the percipients saw the image only as they entered the room, and later it faded at the same time for all of them. This discussion is based on an analysis given by Griffin (1997, pp. 219–221), who, after noting that multiple perceptions of apparitions are not uncommon, said (1997, p. 221), “The view that at least some of the apparitions are due to postmortem agency of the apparent could certainly provide the simplest explanation.”
Superpsi and super-pk explanations of apparitions with multiple percipients usually place the motivation for the apparition in the mind of the main percipient. This requires that the main percipient know the deceased person, and have some reason for wanting to perceive the person. Otherwise, the motivation would then lie with the deceased, which would give evidence for survival, the very thing the superpsi and super-pk explanations are meant to exclude. But there are cases of collective apparitions where the primary percipient did not know the deceased. Here is one such case from Myers’s Human Personality. On Christmas Eve of 1869, just as a woman and her husband, Willie, were about to go to sleep, the woman saw a man dressed in a naval uniform standing at the foot of the bed. She touched her husband, who was facing away from the image, and drawing his attention to it, said, “Willie, who is this?” Her husband said loudly, “What on earth are you doing here, sir?” The figure said reproachfully, “Willie, Willie!” The figure then moved toward the wall of the bedroom. The woman recalled, “As it passed the lamp, a deep shadow fell upon the room as of a material person shutting out the light from us by his intervening body, and he disappeared, as it were, into the wall.” After the disappearance, Willie told his wife that the image had been that of his father, a naval officer, who had died fourteen years earlier. She had never seen him. Her husband had been in anxiety about a large financial transaction, and he took the apparition of his father as a warning for him not to proceed (Griffin 1997, p. 222,). Taking the wife as the principal percipient and the apparition as a hallucination, it is unusual that she should hallucinate an image of her husband’s dead father, whom she had never met or seen. A paranormal researcher might propose that by super-esp the wife picked up on her husband’s anxiety and his unconscious thoughts of his father, and from that material manifested a real apparition by super-pk, causing it to be visible not only to her but her husband. But this is straining perhaps too much to avoid the survival hypothesis. In this case, it is simpler to propose that the surviving spirit of Willie’s father, desiring to save his son from financial ruin, was responsible for his own apparition. Griffin (1997, p. 223) points out that in such cases “Frederick Myers suggested that the postmortem soul, or some element thereof, produces quasi-physical effects in the region of space at which the apparition is seen.”
Evidence for Superhuman Personalities in the Cosmic Hierarchy
In the apparition, possession, and communication cases we have considered above, the appearing, possessing, or communicating entity appears to be a departed human. But in some cases the entity appears to be superhuman, giving evidence for contact with beings at a different level of the cosmic hierarchy than that occupied by departed humans.
Demonic Possession
On January 15, 1949 members of the Doe family in the Georgetown district of Washington, D. C., heard strange knocking and scratching noises in their house (Doe is a pseudonym used in the reports of the case). At first they thought it was the ghost of a departed relative. Eventually, the sounds stopped, and small objects began to disappear and reappear in the house. Pieces of furniture moved inexplicably, and paintings shook on the walls. After a few weeks, the Does’ son Roland, thirteen years old, began to manifest strange symptoms. He talked in his sleep and shouted obscenities. One night the family members heard him screaming and went into his room to see him. They found him and his mattress floating in mid air. The Does, who were Lutherans, sought help from a clergyman. A few nights later, this clergyman witnessed a similar levitation by Roland. These levitations were repeated, not only in the Doe home, but in other houses and hospitals. After the levitations started, Roland started manifesting symptoms of possession. He suffered violent seizures, and a demonic personality took control of his body and speech (Rogo 1982, pp. 41–42).